Aruba Mobile Engagement: A New Way to Interact with Every Customer

We spend a lot of time indoors – particularly in Aruba’s new Portland, Ore. office where outside it’s currently raining! When we do brave the elements for a break, we’ve grown accustomed to using our mobile devices to find a nearby lunch sport or receive directions to a neighborhood store. Until recently, it was challenging to enjoy these location-based services indoors where GPS doesn’t work well. We’ve got an answer for that, Aruba is giving enterprises the tools they need to help us mobile device lovers enjoy those location-based, contextual experiences within public venues. And in a way that’s reduced the potential headaches of the staff who maintain those venues’ technology infrastructures.

The new Aruba Mobile Engagement solution is a fully opt-in, personalized mobile experience for people with smartphones to connect with hotels, retailers, hospitals, museums, stadiums and other venues to receive contextual information based on the indoor location they share and the preferences they declare.

People are craving personalized notifications. After all, personalized communiqués are better than one-to-many generic ones. According to one study, more than 30 percent of Americans said they don’t use mobile shopping apps because they don’t receive useful discounts, coupons, or information tailored to their preferences. Aruba Mobile Engagement helps solve this problem by creating a personalized consumer experience for venues to engage with guests based on their preferences and proximity to in-venue points of interest, encourage onsite interactions and foster brand loyalty.

Our solution uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to provide passive, granular location-based information to consumers’ mobile devices. According to a recent Business Insider report, there is an estimated 570 million Android and Apple smartphones in-use that are compatible with BLE. And with the consumer adoption of beacons leading to 16.5 times more app usage in-store and 6.4 times increase in app user retention, there has never been a better time to begin using our Aruba Mobile Engagement solution.

The new home of the San Francisco 49ers and one of the world’s most advanced open-air sports and entertainment venues, Levi’s® Stadium seats 68,500 spectators inside a 1.85 million square foot facility. Levi’s® Stadium’s state-of-the-art network was built on Aruba mobility technology to deliver exclusive content, venue information and wayfinding services to visiting fans.

“From a technology perspective, it is imperative that we engineered a network infrastructure that not only delivered ultra-fast connectivity to tens of thousands of fans’ mobile devices, but also provided a mobile engagement experience like none other,” said Dan Williams, Vice President of Technology for the San Francisco 49ers, the team that provided the technology infrastructure and mobile app to the Santa Clara Stadium Authority’s project. “By partnering with Brocade for switching and Aruba for mobility, we were able to blaze new ground and create a platform that gave our fans the experience of a personal game day command center in the palm of their hands. Fans can now watch instant replays, receive precise turn-by-turn navigation, and order food directly from their mobile devices. Visitors get to experience the facility and game like never before by greatly enhancing their onsite experience.”

Since consumer privacy is at the top of organizations' and consumers' minds, we have addressed this concern head on. BLE beacons such as ours are inherently privacy friendly. You search for beacons; they cannot search for you. And we require a triple out-in process before giving you access to beacons’ location information. First, you have to download the app. Then, you must agree to share your location. And, finally, you can opt-in to receiving push notifications (which you can opt out of while still enjoying location-aware wayfinding if you choose).

Aruba Mobile Engagement does not retain any customer information from using Aruba-powered apps. If at any point the customer no longer wishes to use Aruba Location Services, they can simply opt out ending all communications between the customers’ mobile devices and the venue. When consumers want to re-engage, they simply active their personal preferences in the mobile app and they are back in action.

We want to provide not only the market’s most precise location-based app experience, but also the most privacy friendly one. If you have any tips we haven’t thought of for doing a better job at both, we’re all ears.

And about those potential headaches for a venue’s staff who must maintain those beacons across multiple locations: We’re introducing remote management. In addition to our battery-powered Aruba Beacons, we’re offering USB-powered beacons that you can plug into participating Aruba Wi-Fi access points (APs). The marriage between the beacon and the AP makes battery life a non-issue. What’s more, it allows the Wi-Fi controller to collect maintenance information about all of the beacons surrounding it. That means an IT person can view the “health” and status of their beacons across multiple locations – all from the comfort of their chair.

Aruba Networks is making indoor mobile app experiences enjoyable for you and me, and scalable for our friends who manage venues’ technology infrastructure. We’ve been waiting a long time, and mobile experiences for venues are finally here and practical.